Super Hydlide

released on Nov 22, 1987

Super Hydlide is an action role-playing game for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. It incorporates a 'good/evil character' morality/alignment system. Like its predecessor Hydlide II: Shine of Darkness (1985), the player has a morality meter that can be aligned with either Justice, Normal, or Evil. The game has both good and evil monsters. Evil monsters attack the player character on sight, while good monsters only attack if the player character attacks them first. Killing any monster, good or evil, results in a reward of experience points, money, and occasionally a piece of equipment. However, if the player kills a good monster, points are lost from a statistic called "MF" (Moral Fiber). If the player's MF stat drops to zero, frequent traps will appear across the world. If the player manages to keep it over 100, rewards appear in the form of random items found around Fairyland. The player can also kill good monsters, which usually lowers the morality meter. Unlike Hydlide II, however, the morality meter no longer affects the way in which the townsfolk react to the player. The game also features an in-game clock setting day-night cycles, where the character must eat two times a day and sleep regularly. If the characters stay up late or fail to eat regularly, their HP and attack power gradually drop. Every item in the game (including money) has weight. If the total weight of items the player character carries exceeds their "Load Capacity" (LC), they will move slowly. The game uses cut scenes for its opening and ending sequences, a combat system similar to Ys, a choice between four distinct character classes, and a wide variety of equipment and spells.


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I've been thinking how music can sometimes carry a whole game, and this one is living proof of that. All around certified bangers.

Game's kinda brutal but interesting in the end. Definitely needs a guide though.

Edit 3 (Final thoughts)

I do want to give shoutouts to the dungeon designs here, which have a nice level of ambition. Seeing how far you can climb into the tower, or diving into the space base, or setting out into the parallel world universe dungeon. Or the setpiece of going to space, exploring the labyrinth of space to find a spaceship dungeon - all pretty cool! Just let down by the so-so action at the game's core.

Edit 2 (After clearing the MSX version)

Alright, so I'm mostly glad I stuck through to the end, but my overall judgment is this game definitely moves in more 'normal' directions . (As a note, the MSX version might have copy protection lol.. the final boss is unbeatable, at least in what I played)

- the world a series of huge reveals (Sky Castle! Secret crashed spaceship! Going into space! Fighting god at the end of time)
- The move to 'press button' combat
- The game world hiding hints to its obtuse puzzles

While I'm all for games that are 'solvable' within the bounds of the game, there is some level of magic lost by the game starting to feel like 'oh maybe i missed a puzzle clue somewhere' rather than 'well it's impossible anyways, so i'll wander and then look up the answer when i'm ready to move on'. Not to say puzzles are bad, but the arbitrariness of Hydlide 3's random puzzle design feels worse when you're sort of expected to solve them.

Ignoring the grind, I did enjoy the various reveals of the game's 'story', and enjoying the art in each. But with a longer game ALSO comes with the design wearing more thin - by the halfway point, you've found the best grinding spot in the game, so you end up ignoring all the enemies and casting the 'Revolve' spell to make them run away. Rather than fighting enemies being something you need or want to do a little, the last 3 or 4 dungeons feel like annoying hallways you want to get through to see the next area.

What's interesting is you can also feel modern ARPG feedback loops appearing in this game. To be sure, Hydlide 2 also had a bit of this with its final dungeon - but because of regenerating health and mp, grinding felt less 'copy and paste' because you would still need to balance safely regenerating with fighting.

In Hydlide 3, you'll set out in the morning, try to earn some EXP and gold, then return home to level up and rest, refill your health items. It kind of allows a game's core design to become "lazy" - where the thrill of leveling up or buying stuff overrides what, to me, should be the focus - enjoying exploration and good action. It's not like any of the Hydlide games did a great job at this, but I felt that there was a much bigger grinding/level barrier to success in 3 than the first 2.

This is a problem a lot of modern ARPGs never really fix. Their core gameplay is so simple and boring and it's all based around just getting better gear to get more fancy/flashy moves. Which has its appeal, but ultimately led to the wonderful genre of gacha games, lol. There's something to be said for Souls games which manage to balance that 'gearing up' with 'practicing/becoming more familiar' to a much better extent.

In any case, I'm still really interested in the successor, Rune Worth! I'll be playing that next..

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Edit 1 (The day after writing the original lol)
I've tentatively increased this to 3 as I plan to finish the MSX version (I found I could just go deeper into a dungeon and find higher EXP monsters with roughly the same danger...what a Hydlideism!)
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Original:

This is an MSX version review. I might try to track down the Windows version and play that instead...

Fun fact: the Genesis remake of this gave enemies 3x+ EXP over this one.
Funner fact: The windows remake gave enemies 16x EXP. With the same EXP tables (I think!)

I'm honestly baffled at how, 3 years after Hydlide 1, the developers were still incapable of making something resembling playable! 1 and 2 were janky, but doable with guides (though 2 requires cheating with money-making to be playable), and the 'bump' combat was charmingly minimal. You could have massive setbacks - or resets - in both, but the thing was that you would still learn some arcane knowledge to let you get around it. A better path of buying items. Grinding spots. How to get behind enemies. Etc.

My biggest surprise is Hydlide 3 became significantly less playable over 1 and 2 - you can't save anywhere, but enemies still tear you to shreds quickly (and from the start have ranged attacks, which 1 and 2 only saved for endgame dungeons).

The EXP curve in this game hates you: by the time any given enemy is safe to attack, you need to kill 100+ of it to level. And you'll have to constantly manage your weight and hunger (as you can become overencumbered via gold monsters drop). Unlike Hydlide 1 and 2 you have to be careful with every enemy as their ranged attacks are easy to hit you. If you want to play it safe, a level might take 400-800+ monsters... Japanese FAQs recommend 6-8 hours of gameplay to clear the first dungeon alone...

1 and 2 feature grinding, but with modern emulation speedups they're quite breezy, and at least you can stand to regenerate your health.

Hydlide 3 takes the simple gameplay of 1 and 2 and adds in systems that do nothing but add extra time running back and forth to town to heal and grind for gold. Each level gives you more carrying capacity, but it more or less just means you can maybe upgrade a weapon to slightly speed up a grind. Paying money to an inn to save, saving up EXP to level at a church, and preparing to go out by buying food - these factors wouldn't be too bad, maybe even charming or interesting - with a higher EXP rate, but... that's not present in the MSX version. The low EXP rate of Hydlide 3 means that any annoying idea will be repeated multiple times as you must go back and forth to replenish supplies.

The game also adds a 'attack' button, so now you have to mash A to attack. I imagine they were copying Zelda 1 at this point, but the attack button is just that - copied. Enemy difficulty goes up, but with none of the balance a more 'action' game requires - consideration to healing, the player's movement, etc.

If there is one thing, the art in this game is quite beautiful, with its small 8x8 tiles. The music finally seems to have been written by a musician, too. And there are some talking NPCs but the game still maintains some of that minimal "Hydlide"-y-ness, where we only get this very small glimpse of a large fantasy world - giant towers reaching into the sky, strange towns hidden underground.

It's a shame it's all hidden behind impassably sloggy EXP curves and a few weird systems! I'll go try the other versions next...

If you do enough research, you'll actually find no shortage of praise for this game from various corners of the internet. A lot of this praise seems to be directed at its hardcore nature and inclusion of atypical mechanics for its era. Even Hideki Kamiya cited Super Hydlide as an inspiration during the production of Scalebound. Yeah, Scalebound. Makes you wonder, huh...

Look, credit where credit is due. The game was for sure ahead of its time with its gameplay. A 24-hour day/night cycle, a weight system that accounts for everything you carry (including money), and the survival-lite mechanics in the form of having to eat and rest after a certain amount of time has passed. On paper, these sound like cool ideas, and they would certainly come to be used more effectively in future RPGs, but they only serve as a major nuisance here. They contribute to this game being jank incarnate, and between your character not even having a fluid walking cycle, and the main environment fluctuating between a vomit green and piss yellow color scheme, it's not a very pleasant game to even look at, much less actually play.

But to explain more in-depth what makes this game suck, I'll cover those so-called "far-thinking" mechanics a bit more in-depth.

24-Hour Day/Night Cycle - What could possibly be wrong with this? Well, apart from dawn turning the environment into the aforementioned piss yellow gradient, staying up for too late will eventually exhaust your character, which makes you weak to the point of not even being able to kill the easiest of enemies, so you're forced to sleep at an inn. Make sure you don't head towards a dungeon before catching some much-needed ZZZ's.

Weight - As I said before, everything you hold in this game holds weight. Realism my ass. How does a dagger weigh twice as much as a club??? Leveling up allows you to carry more weight, but the early game is especially brutal as a result. Holding too much weight slows you down significantly, and increasing the speed isn't really an option because it also makes the in-game time speed up, which means you'll probably need to head back to an inn before you even get a chance to kill a handful of monsters. But hey! There's a bank where you can deposit all that heavy money in! That's cool, I guess...

Hunger - This is probably the dumbest mechanic, and this is totally bias, because I'd often forget to buy food rations and it screwed me over quite a handful of times. I'll be in the middle of a dungeon when I suddenly notice my health draining. Well, shit. Gotta backtrack to a town with an inn. Except I made sure to learn the "move" spell early on which lets you teleport to an inn. But even this wasn't an option a couple of times, because I'd either run out of herbs to refill my magic or I'd get magic sealed... by an enemy? The game doesn't even tell you this, but that's what I imagine happened to me a couple of times that I couldn't use magic for seemingly no reason. If so... seriously? No status effect message or indicator for that?

I got a little sidetracked there, but there really are a lot of issues I have with this game, many of which lead to other problems. So many in fact, that I don't even feel like bringing anymore up. This may seem like a half-assed review, but that's okay. Half-assed games deserve half-assed reviews. Well, it's more of a mini rant than anything.

Despite all that, I still think it's worth a playthrough out of curiosity alone. I would have never gotten through it without a guide and without putting on albums in the background while I grinded and suffered through its horrendous dungeons and cryptic progression. But at that point, it really did become a sort of cathartic journey. It's an awful game, but an interesting experience, nonetheless.

For its time it's not the worst. If you read the manual then you can avoid dying of starvation or being weighed down by basic armor. Balancing of everything, and I do mean everything, is awful, but the game does play without breaking. Don't bother doing dungeons without a map pulled up. Worth picking up as an experience.

Good grief this game was awful. Cool ideas but horrible execution.

real primordial stuff, though emerging from the muck. i wouldn't recommend playing it without a guide unless you're really prepared to get down in there with this cryptic, moldy old thing and grind your way to understanding it. that said, i think it's an unfairly dismissed and even maligned game with some dope music and rewards for those who just find enjoyment in exploring the origins of action rpgs...! moving away from the original hydlide's ys-like bump action, this one's somewhat more zelda-like in that you attack with button presses. this time there's a class system, day/night cycles, and actual story/music! this is a real video game! and a good one, if not quite a great one.